


Lorilei

by randomtrickpony



Series: Courier Friday [1]
Category: Fallout 2, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Character Study, Complete, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-13
Updated: 2013-01-13
Packaged: 2017-11-25 10:11:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/637784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomtrickpony/pseuds/randomtrickpony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was just a girl from Arroyo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lorilei

**Author's Note:**

> This is a backup copy to a piece that has seen the light in several other locations. It is posted here for archive purposes, but if you like it, feel free to add it to your list. I will also be uploading the longer multi-chapter fic featuring Courier Friday, _We Are Dust and Shadows_ , so if you find this worth it, don't miss out on that. This does present some spoilers for the longer fic, however; but I'm uploading this first for two reasons. One, it's already out there at the wonderful Falloutkinkmeme, so you might have seen it there. Two, when I originally uploaded WADAS, there was some confusion on behalf of one of my readers over the Courier's seeming naivety after being shot (she still acts like a child in WADAS, even though she is seventeen by the end of Lorilei and seriously accomplished). I wanted to make it clear in the offset that she has had a whole other life before she suddenly reverts to teenager-dom, and that the shot presses a 'start over' switch on some of her social skills.

Before the kick in the head, before the fate of the Bear and the Bull over a wall that neither would possess, she had been little more than a girl with desperation in her eye and a streak of determination so thick it could be cut with a sword.

She hailed from Arroyo, though it would be years after the shot rang out and changed everything that she would go back, years before she would see her mother and her cousin, whose father had left that village so long ago with a dream for the Capitol Wasteland of a dead nation. Years before she knew that her own father was the very man she would beat to death with a bloody dog-tag fist as he sat upon his throne of everything she would never believe in.

And it would take years before she was ready, because only a woman could do those things, and she started out as nothing but a girl.

The Courier known occasionally as Friday, had another name once, one she wouldn’t remember again until her homecoming, but one which carried her at eleven away from her destitute family in a plea to save them. She had a little sister, and no food on the table, and her mother was too sick and malnourished to carry their flag any longer. So she took it up, because no-one had told her that normally this was the work of a big brother. She’d never had one, so how was she to know?

The Mojave Express agent in Klamath signed her up hesitantly. The girl was barely five foot, her head shaved against the heat and her face younger than the ‘sixteen’ the agent scribbled hastily onto her application after asking. The girl from Arroyo could write some and she could barely read, but she could remember everything the agent told her and that was enough. She was given her first delivery, a test of her mettle, a package to be delivered to a small camp in a place known only as Hopeville.

The girl took the name to heart, it was hope after all that then made her voyage hundreds of miles and more under the relentless stars until she reached the salvagers' camp, in the derelict shell of a ruined city. There, she found friends and a second home, nurtured that home after the delivery and helped it grow, unaware that beasts with larger claws would one day wish to tear it from her.

No delivery was too dangerous or troublesome, and she sent all but a small quantity of expenses for boots and a bedroll home to her family. Her hair grew back out, and she did not cut it this time because that would cost money her sister needed for schooling, and her hand was not steady enough with a knife to shave it herself. She also foraged for most of what she ate. Sure, she realized radscorpions and giant mantis were not the most palatable of choices, but there was the occasional wild bighorner to shoot, and even a deathclaw tasted amicable if grilled with plenty of honey mesquite pods.

Eventually, she delivered the fateful package that tore her from Hopeville and the place the residents had referred to as ‘the Courier’s Mile’, because it was often where she hung her hat when not crossing the world between deliveries. She had heard that her mother and sister were finally prospering, and she was getting ready to return home for a rare visit when the Divide ripped itself and her dreams apart.

She survived it, her end to all hope, though no one else she knew there did. And when she returned to the Express office in Nipton, it was with a body covered in ash and a look in her eyes that was no longer that of a child, though she was only fourteen. Nipton was corrupt, but the agent at the office was rather sympathetic, and lent her a pallet for her sleeping bag and a token for a bath at the communal house.

Sitting frozen, much later, in the quiet of the warm water with only her thoughts and the knots in the ceiling, she decided that she would tell no-one of the events in the Divide, of the destruction she had wrought with her own hands to something so lovely and fragile. And because it still benefited the few that she loved, she would continue as a courier, and she would not let her pain ruin her.

The day when Benny and the Khans caught her in the desert, it was only because she trusted them, the Khans. She often brought them packages when few others would, with candy and fireside stories for their children. It was simply the money that Benny offered, the promises, that moved their hand. For in the harsh embrace of the desert they too had their backs to a wall and this appeared to be a way out.

Lying there, bound and baffled, watching the faces of Jessup and McMurphy, both men that she knew, if only at a distance, she realized this was the end even before Benny spoke. She thought briefly of her mother, of her little sister. Her mind imagined a time in which she might have intercepted them before they caught her, of some sign in the miles between Red Rock and Goodsprings in which she would have known. But there was none, and as Benny held his 9mm to her face, her eyes were caught by the picture of the beautiful woman engraved on the side, her head and half her body visible through Benny’s clenched fingers and the firelight.

The shot which sinks her into darkness is warm, numbing, like being blinded by a thousand of the stars above falling into her brain. She shudders once, as the young woman that she was is burned out into the sand, the earth hungrily stealing the blood which traveled so many miles in both tribulation and need.

And then the Mojave is silent, but for the shushing sound of a shovel hitting grit, and a lone coyote calling her soul back from the avenging moon.


End file.
